It’s unorthodox to hire your head coach before your general manager — usually the GM gets to set the vision and bring in a coach to execute it.

But that’s not the way it is going down for new owner Kings owner Vivek Ranadive in Sacramento — Mike Malone is coming in from Golden State to be the head coach. Now they just need to find his boss and GM.

The Sacramento Kings’ new ownership group has reached out to Hall of Famers Larry Bird and Chris Mullin as well as former NBA coach Mike Dunleavy about running the team’s basketball operations, a search that is wide-open, league sources told CBSSports.com on Monday….

“It’s wide open,” another league source said. “It’s not concrete on those guys.”

But the leader from the start has seemed to be Chris Wallace, the GM who put much of the current Grizzlies roster together but who has been pushed aside as new ownership has gone to a more analytics-based approach. Marc Stein of ESPN hears he is still the front runner.

Word on NBA's executive grapevine is that Chris Wallace's lead in race to be named Sacramento Kings' new GM only got wider over weekend

When I see “Wallace” my mind normally conjures up an image of Rasheed. I was pretty disappointed to see that he wasn’t a candidate, and it was Mike Wallace instead. I’m pretty sure Rasheed could have found a way to get a technical as the GM and we would all be better off watching it.